Muisca People - Muisca Research

Muisca Research

Studies of the Muisca Culture are abundant and have a long tradition. The first sources come from the 'Cronists of the Western Indias', whose work lasted for three centuries during the existence of the Colonial Nuevo Reino de Granada. After the independence wars in 1810 there was a surge of interest in study of the Muisca Culture. White Colombians established the capital of their republic in Bogotá, the former Viceroyal city, which was the capital of the Confederation of the Zipa, and was known as Bacatá. Research shws the place was the cradle of an advanced civilization whose process of consolidation was cut by the Spanish Conquest. This search for an identity resulted in giving emphasis to the Muisca Culture and overlooking other native nations, which were seen as wild people. They wrongly concluded that the Muisca Culture inhabited an empty land and that all archeological finds could be attribured solely to the Muisca people. In 1849 President Tomás Cipriano de Mosquera invited Italian cartographer Agustín Codazzi, who led the Geography Commission with Manuel Ancízar and did descriptives studies of the national territory and an inventory of the archaeological sites. The result of the expedition was published in Bogotá in 1889 as Peregrinación Alfa (Alpha Travels). Argüello García pointed out that the goal of that expedition in the context of the new nation was to underline the Pre-Hispanic civilizations and in that sense they centered in the Muisca Culture as the main model. A similar tendency can be found in the works of Ezequiel Uricoechea. Memorias sobre las Antigüedades Neogranadinas (Memoirs of the Ancient Neogranadian Cultures). An objection to that point of view came from Vicente Restrepo: in his work Los chibchas antes de la conquista española (The Chibcha people before the Spaniard Conquest) showed them as barbarians. Miguel Triana, in his work La Civilización Chibcha (The Chibcha Civilization) suggested that the rock art's symbols merely were writing. Wenceslao Cabrera Ortíz was the one who concluded that the Muisca people were migrants to the Highlands. In 1969 he published Monumentos rupestres de Colombia (Colombian Rock-Art Monuments) and reports about excavations in El Abra. Those publications opened a new era in the studies of the Pre-Hispanic cultures in Colombia. Recent archaeological work has also concentrated on the creation and composition of Muisca goldwork, with this data being made available for wider research.